Everything OddWay knows about. Narrow it down by what you're after, or where you're going.
Giant objects, odd monuments and things built for no clear reason.
Louisville, KY
A former limestone mine beneath Louisville was expanded into an enormous man-made underground space stretching beneath part of the city. The cavern has been used for storage and civil-defense planning and now hosts commercial underground attractions and tours.
Love Valley, NC
Love Valley was deliberately built to resemble an Old West town and still keeps motor vehicles off its central streets. Visitors park outside the core and enter an unusual community where horses remain a normal form of transportation and hitching rails line the wooden storefronts.
Loveland, OH
Harry Andrews began building Château Laroche, better known as Loveland Castle, along the Little Miami River in the 1920s using stone and hand-formed construction methods. The medieval-style castle became headquarters for his Knights of the Golden Trail and now operates as a museum where visitors can explore the rooms, towers and grounds during posted hours.
Lovelock, NV
A small public plaza invites visitors to fasten padlocks to chains as a local ritual of enduring love, creating a Nevada variation on the global love-lock tradition.
Brunswick, GA
A huge live oak spreads over the intersection of Albany and Prince streets and has long been wrapped in local romantic lore. Whatever the legends, the tree itself is an extraordinary urban survivor whose enormous limbs dominate the street around it.
Huntsville, AL
A sprawling former textile mill has been converted into a maze of artist studios, galleries, performance rooms and maker spaces. The building’s industrial shell and dense creative reuse make it feel closer to an inhabited art labyrinth than a conventional gallery complex.
Trenton, NJ
The Delaware River bridge carries the enormous illuminated slogan 'TRENTON MAKES THE WORLD TAKES,' first created to advertise the city's manufacturing power. The blunt industrial boast remains one of New Jersey's most recognizable pieces of infrastructure lettering.
Keokuk, IA
Iowa's lowest elevation occurs where the Mississippi River exits the state near Keokuk. There is no dramatic summit marker, but the location gives OddWay travelers a geographic counterpart to Hawkeye Point.
Hackensack, MN
Lucette is in Hackensack, not Walker, and was created as Paul Bunyan’s fictional sweetheart for the town’s 1952 celebration. The statue has been repaired after weather damage over the decades and still stands in Birch Lake Park near the visitor center as a free public landmark.
Hydro, OK
This tiny former gas station is closely associated with Lucille Hamons, the Route 66 operator remembered as the Mother of the Mother Road. The preserved building remains beside the old highway even though it no longer operates as a service station.
Margate City, NJ
Built in 1881, Lucy is a six-story elephant-shaped building overlooking the Jersey Shore and one of America's oldest surviving pieces of novelty architecture. Visitors can tour the interior and climb to the howdah on her back during scheduled operating hours.
New Orleans, LA
This sprawling Italianate mansion was built in the 1860s for cotton merchant Florence Luling and now survives inside a later apartment complex. Its scale and secluded appearance make it a striking architectural anomaly; view only from lawful public areas.
Los Angeles, CA
Writer Charles Lummis built much of this stone house by hand over decades, filling it with an eccentric blend of Arts and Crafts and Southwestern influences.
Sandyston Township, NJ
Artist Ricky Boscarino has spent decades transforming his home and studio into a fantastical mosaic-covered environment of towers, color, sculpture and found objects. Because Luna Parc is also a private residence, public access is limited to scheduled open-house events.
Nye County, NV
A mile-wide volcanic maar sits along a rough BLM backcountry byway in a landscape once used for astronaut and planetary-field training; the pin is at the public crater viewpoint area.
Mullinville, KS
M.T. Liggett filled his roadside property with whirling metal sculptures, political caricatures, signs, and kinetic scrap-metal figures. The preserved environment remains one of Kansas's most confrontational and instantly recognizable folk-art landscapes.
Rock Island Arsenal, IL
A surviving M65 'Atomic Annie' nuclear-capable artillery piece sits on the active arsenal as an outsized Cold War relic.
Carlinville, IL
A lavish 1870 courthouse became notorious for enormous cost overruns that turned an ambitious civic project into a statewide symbol of excess.
Madawaska, ME
This unusual park marks the northeastern corner of a four-corners touring tradition for long-distance motorcyclists crossing the continental United States. Monuments, engraved pavers, and rider records commemorate travelers who complete enormous cross-country circuits linking Madawaska with the other recognized corners.
Lee, FL
Deep blue first-magnitude spring feeding an extensive underwater cave system.
Madison, NH
Madison Boulder is an enormous glacial erratic carried and deposited by moving ice during the last Ice Age. The exposed granite block is roughly the size of a small building and has long been promoted as one of the largest known glacial erratics in New England. A short approach makes the scale easy to appreciate from ground level.
San Luis Obispo, CA
The famously maximalist hotel uses themed rooms, rock walls, pink dining spaces and an elaborate men's waterfall urinal to turn lodging into roadside spectacle.
Bethesda, MD
Maryland's Madonna of the Trail is one of 12 nearly identical pioneer-woman monuments installed across the country along the National Old Trails Road in 1928 and 1929. Dedicated in Bethesda in 1929, the massive stone figure has been moved several times as the surrounding downtown developed but remains publicly viewable beside Wisconsin Avenue.
Upland, CA
One of twelve identical 1920s pioneer-woman monuments placed across the country stands beside historic Route 66 in Upland.
